04 Jun Teaching the tough stuff

This has been an interesting quarter. It’s my first teaching on my own, and i felt that the students should own their process. So – with all the eagerness that only a naive new instructor could have, i proceeded to construct a course without construction. You can see my syllabus here, which resulted in this schedule.

Because the quarter system is short (10 weeks!), we had a lot of work to do in the first few days. I had them read Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and had them turn in their first assignment by Wednesday of Week 1. I lost around 12 students in the first week, but gained another 12 back. We then chatted about what it was that they felt the point of the class was.

By Week 2, they had to turn in five articles each, on the topic that they would be spending the rest of the quarter on (by Monday). I took these home and skimmed through all (150) of them and looked for themes and repeats. Of these, i found some consistent themes and then constructed the course around them.

What i found so interesting was the number of students who were interested in 1) studying neighborhoods in South King County, or the traditionally diverse neighborhoods, and 2) understanding how race and ethnicity play into segregation or perceptions of safety and housing / transportation. The difficulty was that because this course is a field research course (GEOG 490, Field Research: The Seattle Region), it is not designed to handle some of the big theoretical questions that students raise. Rather, it is designed as a capstone project wherein they mobilize everything they have learned to this point as a catalyst to go out into the field to learn more.

This means, we inevitably hit some rough spots. Mostly, it means that we struggled with race and ethnicity. What are they? How do we think about them? How do we move from noticing patterns in race, ethnicity, or SES in housing, education, or crime to theorizing about these differentiations? Ten weeks (or eight, once the reader was put together by the end of Week 2 – or six when you take into consideration that the last two weeks were dedicated to final presentations) is not enough to tackle these big questions while also diving into the Seattle Region (for which we used the Seattle Geographies book), approaches to visual and other methodologies (for which we used a mess of articles and book chapters ranging from Edward Tufte to Gill Valentine), and topical articles that they were interested in.

So what to do?

What i found fascinating was the range of capabilities and comfort in addressing issues of race and ethnicity and poverty. I knew, at the outset, that they would teach me more than i could ever teach them. And i was right. Beyond the incredible speakers we had over the course of the class (including Craig Mamammano, Julia Wharton, and Christopher Martin Hoff), we visited the Henry Art Gallery for a show of the Seattle Photography Club from the early 20th century, and we hung out with the amazing Amanda Hornby as she showed the students how to find elusive materials to work from in the library.

Overall, between the self-selecting and the amazing topics the students chose, the course was a success. And while some students never quite got past the descriptive aspects of doing field research, i think they gained new insights into field research. I was so lucky to have such a lovely group of students for my first teach-alone experience!